Nvidia GeForce FX 5950 Ultra goes on sale

Pre-order offer reveals all

Nvidia's GeForce FX 5950 Ultra - aka NV38 - may be launched as early as later today, we hear, but whenever it arrives, Creative will be offering a 3D Blaster 5 graphics card powered by the part.

That Nvidia was preparing such a chip has been known for some time, but the company gave the game away itself recently when it included a reference to the part in its latest drivers.

The AGP 8x card will ship with 256MB of DDR memory clocked to an effective 950MHz; Creative's 5900 Ultra-based board has memory running at 850MHz. The 5950's 256-bit, eight-pipeline core is clocked at 500MHz - up from the 5900's 450MHz.

The 5950 is essentially a version of the 5900, tweaked to enable the higher core and clock frequencies. The 5950 Ultra is likely to replace the 5900 Ultra, with the regular 5900 (400MHz core, 700MHz memory) staying around for a while.

All that means it can churn out 375 million vertices per second with a four billion texels per second fill rate. Like the 5900 - aka 'NV35' - the new chip provides 128-bit "studio precision" colour, contains Nvidia's CineFX 2 engine and supports DirectX 9.

How much will this monster cost? Overclockers.co.uk has the beast on pre-order for £393.51 ($666) including sales tax. ®